Counter-argument: bullshit jobs are beneficial to the wider economy.
Society demands consumption, which is funded via wages. The higher consumption, the more the economy grows. Ergo, having more people employed with higher wages creates more economic activity, which in turn fuels more growth, which fuels more jobs, etc. While eliminating bullshit jobs sounds great on its own merits, eliminating the wages for said jobs can actually clog the local engine by lowering wages, raising unemployment, slowing hiring, and curtailing growth. If 15% of jobs are “bullshit” to be eliminated, that’s a 15% reduction in SaaS and seat-based revenues, which means those companies providing services have to cut their headcount, which startles others…you get the idea.
I suggest that instead of cutting “bullshit jobs”, we instead reduce working hours across the board (and penalize overtime) such that more folks have an opportunity to engage in meaningful and valuable labor in exchange for higher wages. Rather than burning out a smaller portion of folks with longer hours, we share the load across multiple folks over a shorter time frame. The extra downtime creates more opportunity for economic activity, which in turn will grow the economy.
You could argue that a bullshit job is a form of rent seeking. The bullshit job worker is increasing his or her share of the wealth without actually creating any wealth through labor. Rent seeking overall is not a good thing for the economy.
I am not arguing in favor of the bullshit job itself, merely that we should retain the labor and dedicate it towards non-bullshit ends instead of the slash-and-burn approach favored by the loudest anti-bullshit-jobs proponents. Workers in every vertical report being overworked relative to compensation, so why not relieve the stress by shifting folks in bullshit jobs back into meaningful roles but at reduced work weeks for everyone involved?
I mean, I obviously know the answers why we don’t (shareholder value, power dynamics, desiring the humiliation of others), but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.
While eliminating bullshit jobs sounds great on its own merits, eliminating the wages for said jobs can actually clog the local engine by lowering wages, raising unemployment, slowing hiring, and curtailing growth.
If you get rid of BS jobs then you're not paying people to do them. Someone then gets the money you're not paying them, e.g. the company can now charge lower prices to customers who then have more money to spend. They then want to buy something else with the money and the people who need jobs then get jobs doing that.
In most cases this will actually increase consumption, because people buy more when things cost less and therefore provide more value for money. If the cost of a year of college goes down by $10,000 by eliminating some bloated administrative bureaucracy then more people can afford it, positions that couldn't previously find qualified applicants get filled and unemployment goes down, those positions pay better and people have more money to spend, etc.
I suggest that instead of cutting “bullshit jobs”, we instead reduce working hours across the board (and penalize overtime)
Isn't this the exact same thing only distributing the hours differently?
You could be proposing one of two things. One is to have everyone work fewer hours doing the same thing they do now, but that one obviously doesn't work. Jobs like carpenter or trauma surgeon aren't BS jobs and if people spent fewer hours doing them then we'd have fewer of those things done, which would be bad.
The other is that instead of getting rid of BS jobs, we get rid of BS work. So we have fewer middle managers and have the people who used to do that instead do something productive, allowing the people currently doing the productive thing to work fewer hours.
The result of that would then be that everyone works fewer hours. But then they would have less money to spend. If you work for 32 hours instead of 40 at the same hourly rate then you take home less money. Getting rid of 20% of hours rather than 20% of employees would reduce total income by the same amount.
If the same thing happens and the company e.g. uses the money saved to lower prices then it's a similar scenario to getting rid of the jobs, except that now instead of production/consumption increasing because we got rid of inefficiency, people work fewer hours to get the same stuff because now they get paid for fewer hours but things also cost less. But that tends to be trouble because the prices change non-uniformly, e.g. the cost of financial services comes down because you eliminate some useless bureaucracy but you haven't done zoning reform so housing is still expensive. When jobs still pay the same amount that's fine, because a bunch of small businesses pay lower costs for payment processing or employee health insurance, lower prices by that much and then have to hire the people who lost their jobs to produce the extra stuff people buy with the surplus money. But if jobs suddenly pay 20% less, your mortgage payment hasn't changed.
Whereas if you take the original premise that people making less money would reduce consumption, e.g. that the savings would go into Evil Corp's money bin and never be spent, then you're in even more trouble in your case. Because you're deterring people from going back to the original number of hours in order to be able to afford the original level of consumption.
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Counter-argument: bullshit jobs are beneficial to the wider economy.
Society demands consumption, which is funded via wages. The higher consumption, the more the economy grows. Ergo, having more people employed with higher wages creates more economic activity, which in turn fuels more growth, which fuels more jobs, etc. While eliminating bullshit jobs sounds great on its own merits, eliminating the wages for said jobs can actually clog the local engine by lowering wages, raising unemployment, slowing hiring, and curtailing growth. If 15% of jobs are “bullshit” to be eliminated, that’s a 15% reduction in SaaS and seat-based revenues, which means those companies providing services have to cut their headcount, which startles others…you get the idea.
I suggest that instead of cutting “bullshit jobs”, we instead reduce working hours across the board (and penalize overtime) such that more folks have an opportunity to engage in meaningful and valuable labor in exchange for higher wages. Rather than burning out a smaller portion of folks with longer hours, we share the load across multiple folks over a shorter time frame. The extra downtime creates more opportunity for economic activity, which in turn will grow the economy.
This sort of argument was addressed long ago in economics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Or the joke about two economists on a walk paying each other $100 daring the other to eat dog shit, increasing the GDP by $200 and creating 2 jobs.
10 engineers do not create a baby in a month.
You could argue that a bullshit job is a form of rent seeking. The bullshit job worker is increasing his or her share of the wealth without actually creating any wealth through labor. Rent seeking overall is not a good thing for the economy.
I am not arguing in favor of the bullshit job itself, merely that we should retain the labor and dedicate it towards non-bullshit ends instead of the slash-and-burn approach favored by the loudest anti-bullshit-jobs proponents. Workers in every vertical report being overworked relative to compensation, so why not relieve the stress by shifting folks in bullshit jobs back into meaningful roles but at reduced work weeks for everyone involved?
I mean, I obviously know the answers why we don’t (shareholder value, power dynamics, desiring the humiliation of others), but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.
If you get rid of BS jobs then you're not paying people to do them. Someone then gets the money you're not paying them, e.g. the company can now charge lower prices to customers who then have more money to spend. They then want to buy something else with the money and the people who need jobs then get jobs doing that.
In most cases this will actually increase consumption, because people buy more when things cost less and therefore provide more value for money. If the cost of a year of college goes down by $10,000 by eliminating some bloated administrative bureaucracy then more people can afford it, positions that couldn't previously find qualified applicants get filled and unemployment goes down, those positions pay better and people have more money to spend, etc.
Isn't this the exact same thing only distributing the hours differently?
You could be proposing one of two things. One is to have everyone work fewer hours doing the same thing they do now, but that one obviously doesn't work. Jobs like carpenter or trauma surgeon aren't BS jobs and if people spent fewer hours doing them then we'd have fewer of those things done, which would be bad.
The other is that instead of getting rid of BS jobs, we get rid of BS work. So we have fewer middle managers and have the people who used to do that instead do something productive, allowing the people currently doing the productive thing to work fewer hours.
The result of that would then be that everyone works fewer hours. But then they would have less money to spend. If you work for 32 hours instead of 40 at the same hourly rate then you take home less money. Getting rid of 20% of hours rather than 20% of employees would reduce total income by the same amount.
If the same thing happens and the company e.g. uses the money saved to lower prices then it's a similar scenario to getting rid of the jobs, except that now instead of production/consumption increasing because we got rid of inefficiency, people work fewer hours to get the same stuff because now they get paid for fewer hours but things also cost less. But that tends to be trouble because the prices change non-uniformly, e.g. the cost of financial services comes down because you eliminate some useless bureaucracy but you haven't done zoning reform so housing is still expensive. When jobs still pay the same amount that's fine, because a bunch of small businesses pay lower costs for payment processing or employee health insurance, lower prices by that much and then have to hire the people who lost their jobs to produce the extra stuff people buy with the surplus money. But if jobs suddenly pay 20% less, your mortgage payment hasn't changed.
Whereas if you take the original premise that people making less money would reduce consumption, e.g. that the savings would go into Evil Corp's money bin and never be spent, then you're in even more trouble in your case. Because you're deterring people from going back to the original number of hours in order to be able to afford the original level of consumption.